Leah Ashton - The Billionaire From Her Past

‘Is Ben here?’ Seb asked, not really looking at her.

Mila shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We broke up.’

A few months ago now. Steph had known, but obviously she hadn’t passed on the news to Seb. Not that long ago Mila would’ve told Seb herself—but things had changed.

For a long while they just stood together silently, Seb was tall and stiff and stoic in his perfectly tailored suit, looking like the successful businessman he was—but it was impossible to ignore the flatness of his expression and the emptiness in his eyes. His dark hair was rumpled—it always was—but today it looked too long, as if he’d missed a haircut. Or two.

A waitress offered canapés, which they both refused. Mila swirled her remaining Shiraz in its glass, but didn’t drink.

She desperately wanted to say something. To ask how Seb was—how he really was. To wrap her arms around him and hold on tight. To cry tears for Stephanie that only Seb could understand. But it had been too long since their friendship had been like that.

It had been six years since Seb and Stephanie had moved to London, and maybe they should have expected things to change with so much distance between them.

‘Did Steph—?’ Seb began, then stopped.

‘Did she what?’

He turned to meet Mila’s gaze. ‘Did you know?’ he said. ‘What she was doing?’

Did you know about the drugs?

Mila shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

Something shifted in his eyes. Relief?

‘Me either,’ he said. ‘I hate myself every day for not knowing. But it helps—in a way—that she hid it from you, too.’

Mila blinked, confused. ‘I wouldn’t say she hid it from me, Seb,’ she said gently, not really wanting to disagree with him on a day like today, but also knowing he deserved her honesty. ‘The last time I spoke to Steph was her birthday.’ Almost six months ago. ‘And we weren’t really talking regularly before that. Not for a long time.’

Seb’s expression hardened. ‘But you’re her best friend.’

Mila nodded. ‘Of course. It’s just...’

‘You should’ve been there for her.’

His words were clipped and brutal. His abrupt anger—evident in every line of his face and posture—shocked her.

‘Seb, Steph always knew I was there for her, but our lives were so different. We were both busy...’

It sounded as awful and lame an excuse as it was. Mila knew it. Seb knew it.

Maybe everything had changed when they’d moved to London. Maybe it had been earlier. Not that it really mattered. No matter how rarely they’d spoken recently, Stephanie had been her Best Friend. A proper noun, with capital letters. Always and for ever.

Until death do us part.

Tears prickled, threatened.

She looked at Seb through blurry eyes. The sunlight was still inappropriately glorious, dappling Seb’s shoulders through the trees. He was angry, but not with her. Or at least not just with her. She knew him well enough, even now, to know that he was simply angry. With everything.

So she wasn’t going to try to defend herself with words she didn’t even believe. Instead she could only attempt to turn back the clock—to be the type of friend none of them had been to each other for this past half decade and more.

She reached for him, laying her hand on his arm. ‘Seb—if I can do anything...’

He shrugged, dislodging her hand. His gaze remained unyielding. ‘Now you just sound like all the others. You’ve just skipped the bit about the weather.’

And as he walked away her tears trickled free.

CHAPTER ONE

Eighteen months later

MILA TOOK A step backwards and crossed her arms as she surveyed the sea of figurines before her.

Fresh from the kiln, the small army of dragons and other mythical creatures stood in neat rows, their colourful glazes reflecting the last of the sun filtering through the single window in the back room of Mila’s pottery workshop.

There was a red dragon with only three legs. A beautifully wonky centaur. A winged beast with dramatically disproportionate wings.

Plus many other creations that Mila now knew she must wait for the children in her class to describe.

It had only taken one offended ten-year-old for Mila to learn that it was best not to mention the name of the creation she was complimenting. Now she went with, That is amazing! Rather than: What an amazing tiger! Because, as it turned out, sometimes what appeared to be a tiger was actually a zebra.

Whoops.

But here she was, surveying the results of her beginners’ class for primary school age children—a new venture for Mila’s Nest—and, to her, the table of imperfect sculptures was absolutely beautiful. She couldn’t wait for the kids’ reactions when they saw their creatures dressed in their brilliant glazes—such a change from the muted colours they’d worn prior to being fired in the kiln.

A tinkling bell signalled that someone had entered the shop. Mila’s gaze darted to the oversized clock on the wall—it was well after five, but she’d forgotten to put up her ‘Closed’ sign.

With a sigh, Mila stepped out of her workshop. Mila’s Nest was one of a small group of four double-storey terrace-style shops on a busy Claremont Street, each with living accommodation upstairs. Mila had split the downstairs area into two: a small shop near the street, and a larger workshop behind, where she ran her pottery classes.

The shop displayed Mila’s own work, which tended towards usable objects—vases, platters, bowls, jugs and the like. Mila had always been interested in making the functional beautiful and the mundane unique.

The man who’d entered her shop stood with his back towards her, perusing the display in her shop window. He was tall, and dressed as if he’d just walked off a building site, with steel-capped boots, sturdy-looking knee-length shorts and a plaster-dusted shirt covering his broad shoulders.

He must have come from the shop next door. Vacant for years, it had been on the verge of collapse, and Mila had been seriously relieved when its renovation had begun only a week or so ago. Even teaching above the shriek of power tools, hammering and banging had been preferable to the potential risk of her own little shop being damaged by its derelict neighbour.

The man picked up a small decorative bowl, cradling it carefully in the palm of one large hand.

‘That piece has a lustre glaze,’ Mila said, stepping closer so she could trace a finger across the layered metallic design. ‘If you’re after something larger, I have—’

But by now Mila’s gaze had travelled from the workman’s strong hands to his face. His extremely familiar and completely unexpected face.

‘Seb!’ she said on a gasp, her hands flying to her mouth in surprise.

Unfortunately her fingers momentarily caught on the rim of the tiny bowl and it crashed to the jarrah floor, immediately shattering into a myriad of blue and silver pieces.

* * *

‘Dammit!’ Mila said, dropping to her knees.

Seb swore under his breath, and dropped to his haunches beside her. ‘Sorry,’ he said, inadequately.

This wasn’t the way he’d planned for things to go.

Mila looked up, meeting his gaze through her brunette curls. Her hair was shorter than it had been at the funeral and it suited her, making her big blue eyes appear even larger and highlighting the famous cheekbones she’d inherited from her movie star father.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said. ‘You just surprised me’.

She piled the largest pieces of the bowl into a small heap, then stood and strode over to the shop’s front door, flipping the red and white sign to ‘Closed’. When she turned back to face him she’d crossed her arms in front of the paint-splattered apron she wore.